John Carr – the founder of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University who retired at the end of 2025 – was honored at a Jan. 21, 2026 gathering there for his life’s work. Before founding the initiative in 2013, Carr also led justice and peace efforts at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for three decades.
In an opening prayer, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the apostolic nuncio to the United States, said, “We thank John for his faithful witness to the Church’s mission in public life, and his dedication to human dignity, solidarity and the common good.”
The initiative’s event was titled “50 Years of Connecting Catholic Social Thought and Public Life: Lessons from John Carr’s Leadership.”
That Georgetown gathering included a conversation between Carr and Kim Daniels, the initiative’s current director; a dialogue with panelists David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, who are columnists for the New York Times; Kerry Robinson, the president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA; and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey; and a closing prayer by Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy.
In welcoming remarks at the event honoring Carr, Joseph Ferrara – the senior vice president for strategic engagement and a senior advisor to the president at Georgetown University – said the initiative “has become a respected center of leadership on Catholic social teaching and an extraordinary resource to the university community here at Georgetown and to the nation and the universal Church.”
Since the initiative’s founding in 2013, it has hosted more than 200 dialogues and other events, with more than 420,000 attendees in person or online. The more than 600 participants and panelists over the years included President Barack Obama, who joined a 2015 discussion on "Poverty in America.”
Ferrara called Carr “an outstanding citizen of the university” and expressed gratitude for his work and dedication in founding the initiative, and he noted the support for that effort by John J. DeGioia, the president emeritus at Georgetown.
Cardinal Pierre praised the initiative’s founder, saying “John’s life and work stand at the very important crossroads, the meeting of faith and public life, of Catholic social thought and the challenges of our world.” Carr’s work, he said, reflected the Gospel call to reach out to the poor and vulnerable and those on the margins. The cardinal said Carr demonstrated that the Church in its advocacy should remain faithful but not partisan, and instead rely on “dialogue rather than division, on persuasion rather than pressure.”
At the front lines of faith and politics
Kim Daniels – who succeeded John Carr as the initiative’s director and who was a panelist at the group’s first event 13 years ago on “The Francis Factor” that examined Pope Francis as he began his papacy – then joined Carr for a conversation about his life’s work.
She noted the recent statement by Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Cardinal McElroy and Cardinal Tobin that raised moral concerns about current U.S. foreign policy, which drew loud applause from the audience in Georgetown’s Gaston Hall.
Also pointing to domestic challenges in the United States, Daniels said, “We pray tonight for our sisters and brothers who are afraid to go to church because of massive and indiscriminate deportations,” and in the prayer she noted “the people in Minnesota who are suffering in a particular way from a campaign of the fear and brutality,” a reference to the largescale immigration enforcement effort in Minneapolis which has sparked much community resistance there and where a mother and an ICU nurse opposing the buildup were shot and killed in recent weeks by federal agents.
John Carr, a Minneapolis native, later noted he had grown up near where Renee Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, not far from where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer during an arrest in 2020, and close to Annunciation Catholic Church where two children were killed and 21 other people were injured in an August 2025 mass shooting during a school Mass.
“These are tough times,” he said, later adding that the Church’s advocacy for social justice “is more important than ever.”
Early in his career, Carr worked as a staff member of the Urban Affairs Commission of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minnesota. Around 1975, he and his wife Linda moved to the Washington, D.C., area, where they raised their four children.
In Washington, Carr first worked as a coordinator of urban issues for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Then John Carr worked with the National Committee for Full Employment led by Coretta Scott King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Later after briefly working again for the Catholic bishops’ conference, John Carr served as the director of the White House Conference on Families under President Jimmy Carter.
During the 1980s, John Carr served as the Secretary of Social Concerns for the Archdiocese of Washington, working with the archbishop then, Cardinal James Hickey, as the archdiocese greatly expanded its outreach to the area’s growing homeless and immigrant populations.
Then later that decade, Carr began working for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as the director of the justice and peace efforts there.
“I have been immensely blessed to spend my life at the intersection of faith and politics, and Catholic social teaching and public life,” Carr said. “…My vocation, my commitment, frankly, where I feel most at home is in the social ministry of the Church.”
At the USCCB, Carr assisted the nation’s Catholic bishops with their statements on “Faithful Citizenship,” on war and peace, Catholic social teaching, care for creation, and on human life and dignity. In his work there, Carr said he tried “to help the bishops be good teachers and pastors and leaders.”
He also represented the U.S. Catholic Church in travels to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Rwanda and South Africa, Russia and Ukraine, Central America, Vietnam and the Philippines, Europe and the Vatican.
Carr said that the advocacy from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops played a key role in Congress passing measures including the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Child Tax Credit, and legislation opposing the use of landmines.
“It was a great job. I saw the Church at its best in this country and around the world,” he said.
Explaining his impetus for leaving the bishops’ conference to found the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University in 2013, Carr said, “I felt we needed more focus on Catholic social teaching, (and) more voices, particularly lay voices, in a dialogue on faith and public life.” Key to that effort, he said, has been encouraging the participation of future, younger and Latino and African-American leaders in the Catholic Church.
Carr underscored that the initiative encouraged conversations in its dialogues, among speakers from varied backgrounds, with many women and minority panelists.
“We’ve learned over these 13 years that there’s a hunger for the moral vocabulary of Catholic social teaching… and there is a thirst for dialogue in our divided capital, in our polarized nation and in our Church,” which also has divisions, he said.
The seven themes of Catholic social teaching center on the life and dignity of the human person; a call to family, community, and participation; rights and responsibilities; the option for the poor and vulnerable; the dignity of work and the rights of workers; solidarity; and care for God’s creation.
Carr noted a fear of visibility among political leaders, among Republicans afraid to talk in a public forum about President Trump, and among Democrats afraid to talk about the pro-abortion orthodoxy of that party’s leadership.
“We learned that you begin with faith, not politics. You start with Jesus, and you start with these moral principles… If you think we have what our country needs and what the world needs, then you engage and persuade, you listen and learn,” he said.
The initiative’s founder warned against the Catholic Church becoming partisan in the public square. “It can’t be an apologist for any administration, it can’t be a cheerleader for any candidate, and it can’t be a chaplain for any party,” Carr said.
The Church’s advocacy sometimes requires “work with others who don’t share our convictions, (in order) to advance the common good.”
Summarizing his hopes for that work, Carr said, “I’m more convinced than ever that the principles of Catholic social teaching offer a way forward. I hope as we move forward, we can find a way to unite around a person, Jesus Christ, around the Gospel, and the fundamental principle of the dignity of all God’s children.”
‘Our collective conscience’
During the dialogue honoring John Carr’s leadership, Kerry Robinson – the president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA – said, “I think of you as our collective conscience.”
Robinson, who leads a network of Catholic Charities agencies across the country that provide help and hope for more than 15 million people each year, said Carr has been “able to remind us all of the time, that whatever else we are doing in our personal, professional or vocational lives, if we call ourselves Christian, if we call ourselves Catholic, we cannot abandon the poor.”
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark praised Carr as “a man of faith.” He noted that Carr advocated for the Church’s response to challenging issues for many years, and kept at it after some social justice battles were lost. “You stayed with it, and that’s a great example of faithfulness,” the cardinal said.
E.J. Dionne – a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a contributing columnist for the New York Times – echoed that point, saying, “John knew you could win on some and lose on some, and fight another day. Political realism is a friend, not an enemy, of a politics of justice.”
David Brooks – who is a columnist for the New York Times, a contributor to the Atlantic and a commentator of the PBS News Hour – noted how in looking at politics over the last 20 years, people seem to have lost faith in each other, in government and in institutions. At this moment, it seems Catholic social teaching is urgently needed, he said.
Brooks, the author of books including “The Road to Character,” said that at a time when a “politics of pure power and pure nihilism” sometimes seems to be coming from the White House, and as there seems to be more cynicism and a loss of faith among the public, “the radicalness of Jesus’s example is an antidote to that.”
The dialogue participants were then asked how the Catholic social teaching being presented now by Pope Leo XIV offers a response to the challenges of today.
Kerry Robinson noted how when Catholic Charities workers from across the country gathered for their 2025 annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Pope Leo sent a letter to them, thanking them for being “agents of hope in this moment.” She said those words of encouragement offer inspiration to Catholic outreach programs serving the poor, “just when we need those words the most… and they are coming to us in English with a Chicago accent.”
E.J. Dionne – who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of several books, including “Our Divided Political Heart” – noted how Pope Leo chose his name as a sign that he would be carrying on the work of Pope Leo XIII, whose landmark 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” championed social justice for workers in the modern world.
“He (Pope Leo XIV) has a really healthy obsession with AI, artificial intelligence, and if there is any topic in which we need clarity and moral thinking right now, it’s on AI,” Dionne said.
He also underscored how Pope Leo, as mass deportation efforts are underway in the United States, has been speaking out on behalf of immigrants.
“It could not be more important having that Chicago-accented voice speaking to all Americans, not just Catholics, but all Americans, on what we owe to our immigrant neighbors from around the world,” Dionne said.
Cardinal Tobin, when asked about the statement that he and his two fellow cardinals had made urging a moral compass for U.S. foreign policy, said, “One of the essential or fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching is the common good. The common good is something that involves everybody. It’s that fundamental dignity that each person has.”
The cardinal added that “it’s a community where diverse voices can be not only heard but encouraged to work together for the good of all.”
He decried current societal tendencies to strip people of their human dignity, not seeing their faces, but calling them names or reducing them to statistics.
“That’s a message with AI and emerging threats to human dignity to which the Church must and can speak successfully,” Cardinal Tobin said.
Responding to a question about how Catholic leaders today can work in new ways to reach people of different generations and backgrounds, Cardinal Tobin noted how during the Synod on Synodality in Rome, the idea of reaching the world’s “digital continent” was emphasized, but he said that new media has sometimes “devolved into an instrument that enhances division and polarization.”
The cardinal said that media can be used “to restore people’s faces and see people as they really are” instead of being an echo chamber.
In response to a question about engaging young and immigrant Catholics in those conversations, Dionne said old notions central to Catholic teaching, like solidarity, empathy and hope, are needed today.
David Brooks noted that in a class that he taught at Yale, the reading assignment that was most popular among his students was “The Long Loneliness,” the autobiography of Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist who devoted her life to serving the poor. Brooks said that even though by the world’s standards, “her life made no sense,” his students “were transfixed by her.” He noted how Dorothy Day said she was grateful that throughout her life, “she thought of the Lord.”
In her closing remarks, Kim Daniels called John Carr “the original happy warrior” who reminded his colleagues that love for the poor is at the heart of the Gospel. “All of us at the initiative are ready on carry on this good work. We’re grateful for your work, your example, and what you’ve built here at Georgetown,” she said.
The people in the crowded auditorium and in the balcony overhead then gave Carr a long standing ovation. More than 2,500 people joined the gathering either in-person at Gaston Hall or online.
Closing prayer
Daniels then introduced Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, who will be participating in the initiative’s March 18 Dahlgren Dialogue on “Faith, Democracy and the Common Good: Lessons from John Courtney Murray for Our Times.”
Before offering the closing prayer, Cardinal McElroy joked about John Carr’s habit of calling people on the telephone, and calling them again, when he thought something needed to be done, and he jokingly compared him to a biblical figure.
“There is the figure of the persistent widow in the Gospel, and for 50 years, John has been the figure of the persistent widow, but with Irish charm and joy on behalf of justice,” the cardinal said.
Then in his closing prayer inspired by Jesus’s words about serving “the least of these” in Matthew 25, Cardinal McElroy said:
“Lord our God, we give thanks for the graces that you have poured out on your Church and our country through John’s ministry of witness, hope and compassion.
“When they were hungry, you found a way to feed the children of our country by encircling them in protection;
“When they were thirsty for a society that practices dialogue and mutual respect, he created and sustained communities of discourse, and politics of mutual trust;
“When they were strangers, he invited immigrants into our land and helped us to see in them the face of Christ and worked to banish the ugliness of racism and discrimination;
“They needed clothing, and he raised up our hearts to the human dignity which clothes us all in the image of God: the unborn, the elderly and all of the marginalized;
“They were sick, and he forged alliances to achieve health care for all those in need;
“They were in prison, and he taught us never to abandon those who are suffering from the myriad of prisons that weigh us down profoundly.
“Lord, fill our hearts with joy for all that has been accomplished in John’s life of family and service, and raise up men and women filled in God’s grace to carry on his legacy as servants of God’s justice and peace.
“We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
